The Bum's Rush
My friend, I can sit here and buy you a whole pitcher of that beer, that beer that I can smell from here to be... Yuengling... Black and Tan. (Ah? Heh.)
I can watch you work your way through it, watch your tongue unlimber and your senses likewise wind down to a warmer, more relaxed version of yourself, more credulous, more accepting...
And then, more in flight, like they all end up, right to the door, with the last third of your pitcher left here for me to hand to the nearest old suffering alcoholic to finish.
I can do all that, and have done so on at least four other nights. I can tell you the tale you just asked to hear, when you asked me about all the scars on my face. No offense taken. When I tell you, you're not going to believe one blessed word.
You won't believe the real reasons why I haven't touched anything stronger than this bottomless cup of coffee before me in the saucer, the one that the young bartender here at this student dive keeps refilling every night, over and over, like a geisha, and not charging me for.
I tip him anyway. Charlie and I have an understanding. He says that working here keeps him off the sauce, since he gets to see how shitty people are at the end of the night.
He may think he has some idea about that, some understanding. He doesn't know how deep down all that stuff can go. How shitty people get, then... and how shitty people have the potential to become. To themselves, to each other, and to the gods.
Put your tongue back in your head. Yes, I said 'gods'. Until the night you just asked about, I was a militant atheist. But after the ...err, gig... that I... sat in on, you could say... After I got the scars on my face, after fifteen guys beat me to within an inch of my life in the parking lot afterward, and I never fought back once.
Yeah, I believe that there are many gods. Not all of them are insane. But the insane ones make their vicious senses of humor quite apparent to the unwary traveler, when it's cold and you're broken down at the side of the road, when even a table set as a snare can look like home, if you want it to badly enough.
It was way, way south of here, in Powersburg. You never...? Ah hell, a little south of Lock Haven on I-66. Couple of hours from the New York border.
The Town That Time Forgot, undisturbed by the rush of any passing current at all. Don't Blink Or You Might Miss It. Glad to be back up here in the United States of Ithaca, tonight, my friend.
Believe it or not, my psychiatrist makes me come to this place. He calls it 'exposure therapy'. And 'flooding'. Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm not going back to where it happened, no matter what he says.
If I show my face in Powersburg again, after what I did, I have a sinking suspicion that no firearm in the world would protect me from the wrath and blood-cures of Pat Connelly's regulars.
I understand them. People are all the same. You won't believe me anyway, none of you do. You...
Yeah, I teach up at the college. So that means you'll believe me?
Heh. Smart kid. I guess you do want to listen.
Listen...
The pub appeared to have been brought over from the Old Sod and reassembled brick by brick by a crew of itinerant local drunkards on a Sunday morning, using a spirit-level filled with the previous night's spirits. It looked like an accident. It looked warm. Pete loved it immediately.
To fveel that way about a hole-in-the-wall frame house someone built into a bar in the Forties and left for dead should have tipped him off to his mental state, but he was lost, and his feet hurt, and the backpack was starting to feel like a cinderblock.
The pub made him remember other times, before the perpetual rut of grad school bled his veins down footnotes until they ran dry. It almost made him smile.
He supposed he could have stopped at the hotel he saw before he got to the pub, something called the American. It looked about the same, though, just a dive with two more floors on top than Connelly's. He could imagine the rooms, the come-stains and Gideon Bibles and the smell of old rolling tobacco and older mold. He pressed on, and pressed his luck, toes starting to grow cold in his worn-out Adiddas sneakers.
Leaves blew around those sneakers, over the crumbling brick sidewalks, the upthrust flagstones that sometimes had fragmentary words carved on them, the tree roots, the broken bottles, the coal-slag mud.
Night was coming on fast, in the shadows of all those railroad bridges and tunnels. The mountains began breathing forth long blue columns of darkness that would trip Pete up well before he got anywhere else that looked like a night's rest.
Whatever shelter could be afforded at the pub would be dearly paid for by the terrors of the walk. Between him and the mellow, smeary 1930's reinforced glass of the windows that awaited him, a lot of dogs were barking in Powersburg that night, and not many sounded leashed.
Out in this particular storm, there looked to be only one ready port at the end of that long block of something called Adams Avenue that looked like an alley with street parking, to him, where some frightful fiend had slipped its collar and now trod close behind.
He could still taste the coffee the cops had foisted on him, hear their alien accents so much like Pittsburgh-ese strained through Scots Gaelic and Dutch Country until it emerged, "Yeah, buddy, y'kna that rod'ar your car threw, it went right through your engine block? My Dad, he fixes up Mustangs, though.Bet he'd give you a grand or two t'take the thing off your hands, since y'said y'can't afford a new engine. What'd'jsay?"
In his throat, the bitter wind of paper mill and coal gas left its stench up and behind the sinuses. There were lots of post-War tract houses held up with heavy jacks where the foundations of the dwellings had been divested of a rotten back molar or two, and fronted with plastic Z-Brick that never looked like anything but plastic with bricks drawn on it. For half the second block, his view was dominated by a long, low tin-and-cinderblock outbuilding, with small slit windows and gaps in the walls.
Past that one, Pete followed the progress of some sort of small-scale assembly line, the hum of conveyor belts and raucous, mechanical banter of the line workers mostly drowning out Taylor Swift on the radio.
The air tasted contagious, not so much paper-mill as rumor-mill, where roadside bandits might grow as large in rural folklore as galloping Hessians, as though a comet left its trail over the region a million years before and now even the roots of the trees, the water, the people breathed out the very spores of wonder and abomination in equal measure.
Then came the block of older houses, with the long lawn at the end, on the right. That house had a plate glass window in the front room, with the basement door underneath the porch opening onto that same high room where the ceiling had been knocked out between them when the house became a public one. Under its white incandescent sign, a painted pane read in simple, eloquent black art-deco letters, CONNELLY'S, the glass cracked by a bullet hole.
It was big, too, big enough to hold perhaps a hundred and fifty people at most. None of them were listening to Taylor Swift. Pete heard and noted the 1930's County Sligo fiddle before he even stumbled into that strange little wooden hive... Gotta be a copy of a copy, on CD from somebody's phonograph blank...
But the mammoth glass coffin of a 1980's-vintage Wurlitzer jukebox, with honest-to-goodness vinyl 45 records, was unplugged. There seemed to be a preponderance of the Eighties on it, Pete noted, the track of his own thoughts pleasantly warm from the pocked flask he hadn't sampled until the 1965 Mustang he wasn't sure he ever wanted to inherit threw a rod on I-66 and he walked away from the wreck, trembling,. Until he got in cell phone range of something, anything, that answered to 9-1-1...
Yes, indeed, the Eighties had never cleared out of Connelly's after last call, he affirmed, checking in his coat pocket to make sure that the flask was both still present and tucked well away. Or the Nineties, either. A bar of moonlight fell across the unlit song-list... INXS "NEW SENSATION" * THE POGUES & KIRSTY MACOLL "FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK" * NIRVANA "WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?" * ELLIOTT SMITH "NEEDLE IN THE HAY". * JEFF BUCKLEY "LAST GOODBYE" *
No, it didn't really say that. Did it? Big Pete in his black hoodie and nice leather jacket, looking like a sore thumb, leaned against the juke and tried not to act what Pennsylvania Liquor Control always called "Visibly Intoxicated" on every extremely visible sticker in every bar he'd been in. Including this one.
Oh, this juke got funnier and funnier, it did. In between Georges Jones through Strait, Conway Twitty, and Van Morrison, he saw JOY DIVISION "DEAD SOULS" * THE PLASMATICS "LIVING DEAD" * THE JIM CARROLL BAND "PEOPLE WHO DIED".
Pete looked owlishly up and around, ostensibly to locate the Gothy college -student bar back with the death fetish, but no one in there looked like that. Whoever had programmed the juke had apparently moved on long ago. There was a simple horseshoe over the bar, photographs of local boys in uniforms of various sorts, and an ornate tile mosaic, almost too small to read: MAY THE ROAD RISE ALWAYS TO MEET YOU, MAY THE SUN RISE ALWAYS BEHIND YOU, AND TILL NEXT WE MEET MAY THE GOOD LORD KEEP YOU IN THE PALM OF HIS HAND.
In that half-packed dive, out in the middle of nowhere on that wretched stretch of 66, Pete found himself smiling and tapping his foot to the fiddle, like he was nineteen again and stepping through the front door of the first pub in Brooklyn where he ever bought a round. He almost lost himself, in the blue haze of smoke, rubbing his rain-smarting eyes. He still had all the paperwork from the cop-shop in a business-sized envelope, smeared with mud and blood from the wreck, folded into his back pocket like a shopping list with two phone numbers printed on the outside.
Doctor Barber would be fuming, but Barber had three Teaching Assistants, not just him. And Barber knew about old cars, too. He'd get it, and be properly horrified at the loss.
The total loss, as his insurance company had grimly informed him from the other end of the pay-phone booth, with the door that almost shut (practually a museum piece). In what the school paper had memorably termed "these economic times", Pete knew he could never afford a new engine for Sally on his grad-school pittance.
He'd been loathe to ditch her, though he'd lost his joy for her restoration and upkeep. It was the circumstances by which he'd come by the '65, back before he fell from Heaven. Back when he wrote for Rolling Stone, that magical year, and never spoke anything but English anywhere.
He thought of his Grandpa, when he did. Grandpa would never speak English. He said it was beneath him. In his own studies, Pete chose the mior he did simply so he could read Grandpa's poems in the original.
His major, on the other hand, was Anthropology. All that weekend, he'd been knocking his brains out on fieldwork, driving all around Hell's half-acre trying to find good bluegrass music in this part of the world, played by actual hillbillies, with fumes in the tank and leftover Top Ramen in the refrigerator.
Barber didn't believe there could be that many real Appalachian fiddlers anywhere near this part of Appalachia. He hadn't done the work Pete had, or driven through all the weird little wide parts in the road.
Pete clicked the recorder to Voice-Activate, not knowing why. Even the suff on this home-made CD the pubman was playing would make Ken Burns sit up and clap along. Barber didn't know his ass from third base.
Presently, the song on the CD player changed to a different folk combo, one playing a fast reel, with a button-box concertina dipping out of it with hard little cormorant-beak notes. A few of the red-faced old gammers and oyster-eyed skeletons with beards at either end of the bar looked up superstitiously, then right back down when they saw a stranger in their place.
Pete knew they'd let him in, and let him be. But no one would be making small talk, either. He knew this part of the world a tiny bit, mostly from the window of a car, and could guess how the night would go.
Fine with him. As long as there was beer, a meal and, eventually, bed, he could sit and read the paper for nine hours, and still be overjoyed to be alive.
Pete had only a journalist and academic's understanding of Irish music. He counted himself as Irish as anyone else did on St. Pat's, and no other day. His own calendar had a whole different set of holidays.
He cocked his head in the direction of his tape recorder, still looking at the songs on the juke while the madding crowd paid him no mind. "The song you're hearing now was covered by either the Pogues or the Cheiftains, please scour teh internets for which one. Sounds like another phonograph recording..."
His eyes kept flicking back to that carefully-built stage, as out of place in that dive as ferns, absinthe or alternative sexualities. There were msuic stands on it, for crying out loud, Glenn Miller-era brass things with a cutout lyre stencil design in the middle, in the flat metal.
The dust was heavy up there, and all the cables were coiled. All the amps were still. Yet something felt like there'd be a show. Pete could hear it in the dust, thick as the beat of a hide drum.
He was thinking of asking about a room, or where to get a bus and how quickly. He was thinking of a lot of things, but wanted to be thinking of nothing at all as quickly as possible.
Thus pondering and oscillating physically, mentally, and spiritually, Pete reached for a cigarette he didn't have and tried to scowl back at the surly mook behind the bar, who just scowled more.
"What'll it be?" he rasped.
Pete beamed, momentarily hopeful to not have to mix the contents of his flask with anything dissimilar. "Tully's?"
A blink, a whisk, and a shot of something that wasn't Tullamore Dew sat before him.
"Horse piss," the crewcut, acne-scarred giant pronounced through his ruddy face. "This is local whisky, son. Get it down ye. I won't have no one sufferin' the affliction of the commercial version in my place. Five even, like."
Pete put seven dollars on the bar, and he made that go away, too.
"Horse piss," he repeated. "Who's the distiller?"
The pubman surveyed Pete for a long time, shaking his head and wiping his hands on his black apron. "Me. Just popped a cask from five year agone. Get it while it's here, before those damned mill rats start beggin' for what you just were."
Pete bent over the glass, breathing in the bouquet, and nearly lost the first layer of skin on his eyes. The pubman roared with laughter. His newest guest did half the shot, and let it sink in.
Closing his eyes, Pete breathed the bitter honey air of pub, of steel grills, steak and onions, beer so dark it looked like tar and a hundred weird brands of cigarettes. All the backs pointing at him and the general air of You Ain't From Anywhere Near Here couldn't take that moment away.
The song on the CD changed once more, and between applause wound in again to a raucuous verion of "Star of the County Down" with some bits he'd never heard.
He looked again at that stage. The carpet on it was not red, but a faded sea-green,with a knotwork pattern drawn around it in blue and gold. The gold parts marked five distinct points. He wonsdered what that meant. Carpet on the stage and honky-tonk classics on the juke.
Exdept tonight, apparently. All around, the sausage-fest of local yobs, yeomen and youth was loud, but oddly subduesd. Like they were waiting for something. Not a woman in sight. Lots of broken teeth, though. And tattoos, many identifibly in Slovak, Gaelic, or Polish. Or Marine.
"We make our own whisky, out this way," was all the pubman finally said, when he was done drawing the next pint on whatever order-slip existed in his head at that moment. "An' will ye want anything from the stove, before I shut it off?"
Pete nodded. He liked to think he learned fast. Sometimes. When he wanted to. "Whatever's up, whenever you get to it. Later, not now."
The pubman made a noise in his throat. "Friday. The lot of youse get fish and chips, and there'll lbe no whinin' about--"
Then, just like that, a mutton-leg hand had Pete up in the air by main force. A tiny, bald-headed face with ears like Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant was looking at him atop a long neck that towered above a white t-shirt, red suspenders, back jeans and high Doc Marten bovver-boots.
"No outsiders tonight," the face growled. "Not in here. Not tonight. You're gettin' the bum's rush, fucker. Nobod cuts open my golden goose. Out."
Pete was a very good boy and didn't flail. He could see behind them.
HUCK-HUCK. The pubman was standing there, holding a very ugly sawed-off shotgun whose like Pete had only ever seen Arnold Scharzenegger wield. He never even saw the guy cross the bar.
The ride was over. Pete was lowered carefully to the floor.
"Whee," he said.
The big Skin shook his fist. The pubman's shotgun leveled in his direction.
"Not tonight, Billy Frick," he said warningly. "Oh, not tonight of all nights. He got in the door. That must mean it's all right. Otherwise... it would not be allowed. No go get back in yer beer an' drink. Get quick, like. No fookery."
And for a ninth wonder of the world, the pubman crossed himself like a choirboy, lowering his weapon as he did. "Band's comin'," he said, grinning that Druid ruin of teeth, like that meant anything or explained a thing at all. "Only happens once every few years. Fewer and fewer, these days."
Billy bent his head, and crossed himself, too. "Sorry, Paddy. 'Twere the drink."
Pat dismissed this with a snort, as he restored the shotgun to its upright and locked position behind the bar where it had been. Something twinkled behind his eyes.
"You've come on a special night, you see, and not a dollar for a cover charge, is't, lads?"
At this, everyone in earshot roared good-natured laugher and raised their glasses.
Pete felt a general softening of the air.
"Pat Connelly," the pubman said, sticking out a hand. Pete shook it, and started to introduce himself. Just then, his earlier review of the Callaight County Sausage Fest was severely curtailed.
"Papa!" the most fiery redhead he'd ever seen called in a sweet, high voice, ducking under a white drop cloth he hadn't even realized was their kitchen door. "Last order's up! And I'm off!"
When she looked at Pete, at first he wanted to forget that he ever had to talk. Her hair was true red, bobbed around her small pink ears. Her eyes were amber-colored, like old firelight on the best night you can remember. Her mouth was hard not to watch. And the rest of her...
Well, the rest of her wore a black apron, and though her cute little snub note screamed to be kissed, she looked so much like Pat that it put Pete off his feed, for the time being. Probably a good thing.
She cocked her head at him. "Who let you in?" Her brogue was deliciously faint, coalescing in every word like vibrating harpstrings.
Pete roared with laughter. "Not Billy Frick, I know that much. And not your Dad, either. He seems to just tolerate me."
"Hmmph." That nose turned up more. "No, I mean, nobody but the regulars're supposed to be here, tonight. It's not... It's not done. Not that I remember, but if Dad hasn't hove you out yet, then I won't try." Her upper lip curled from a sneer to a smile. "Kinda cute, if you cleaned up. I suppose a tourist can see this. If you behave."
This was new. "Tourist," he scoffed. "I'm from Ithaca. Anyway, see what?"
Pat clinked a new shot in front of him, and one for his daughter. "My round," he whispered. "Shandeen, you be gentle wi'him. And I want you flamin down the ice wells first thing tomorrah. First. Thing."
Shandeen rolled her eyes. "Yes, Dad. Eight a.m., when I always wake up anyway because you sing so goddamned loud in the shower--"
"--Lord's name--"
"--Go on with you." Shandeen tapped her watch. The regulars were growing as somber as an Easter service, slowly but surely cycling down to a dull roar. Pat looked at his own watch, got up and changed the CD.
And that was it. Just nothing. These Irish, Pete thought. Put a miracle in front of them, they put the kettle on for it and ask if it would mind closing the door behind itself.
A shot and a beer later, he remembered to pester Shandeen about what she just said. She fired up a long white cigarette that looked like maybe a Benson and Hedges or a Virginia Slim, and thought about that.
The natives were getting restless. The house lights were growing dim. One more beer and he was going to cut himself off. All right, two. But he'd make them last.
The freckles that dusted her cheekbones like mermaid gold still complemented the blush in her cheeks he couldn't believe he was privileged enough to see. It sobered him up for a minute. All right, quite a bit. He was still feeling it, but he wanted coffee. At least he did then.
"We've never had anyone come in tonight but the regulars," Shandeen told him thoughtfully. "I s'pose it is kind of a holiday. But for us. No one comes down here but Foundry people, all this neighborhood, that is. The Foundry's just the old name. Miners' brats and railroaders. Mostly Irish, a few Polishers, some of the Rooshians if they act right."
Pete was riveted. She saw the look on his open, careworn face and reached for her lighter.
"How long've yeh quit?" she sniped, and finally lit him. "We have some... musicians that come in, this night once every few years. Old-time music. Our music. The fiddle and drum. Bagpipes, too, but small and not so much like a hog getting castrated as the Scots'. I--"
She waited until Pete was done laughing. "I said something."
"Cheers."
"Slainte."
"Whatche?"
Shandeen sighed. "Cheers. Oh, look what the wind blew in."
Pete's eyes shot toward the heavy front door as it swung inward with a mightly groan. He felt something close to superstitious dread, and had no idea where it came from. Something else wound into that dread was akin to religious exaltation, the kind he'd forgotten he could feel, or that anyone could ever feel anywhere, certainly not in a church and never on a holiday.
But maybe there was more than one kind of holiday. Pete wanted that door to creak open, and stay open on something besides Billy Frick, who came in making big smacking sounds and clomped right up to the bar.
Pat looked away, and began pouring him what appeared to be a Greyound that he simply waved somewhere near a grapfruit and called good. Shandeen made gagging noises. Pete knew he must have asked something.
"Loses his upper partial down the commode once or twice a week, he does. Has to go out back and fish it out of the pipe."
Pete made some noise of disbelief that canceled itself out at the sight of Billy gargling his Greyound. "SHIT gonna be SICK gonna OH shit GONNA BE---"
Then everything stopped.
There was no reason for there to be fog, that night. It hadn't rained. There was no reason for it to feel that cold, or for all the sickening thoughts in Pete's poor addled head to give rise to sickening others... This is what they do with miracles, in this town. They keep them to themselves. Despair is a sin. So is imagination. But to hide the light of something like this behind the blinds one of the bar backs was drawing across the front windows, to lay a dumb-supper, once a year, and let the dead sing out...
He'd had too much. Life was going to hurt tomorrow. But Pete still couldn't blink.
They carried their gear with them, in packs or sacks or just across their backs. The guy bringing up the rear was hossing up a big old bodhrain drum like it weighted no more than a baby. He saw a gittern, for crying out loud. Those odd hybrids of a guitar and a lute went out of vogue sometime around the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
He could never explain how much he understood when the band walked in, or how fast. They trooped for the stage like shame-faced, slat-sided dogs, like skulking cats in a straight line just beyond the line of sight, a pale host behond the pale reach of human notice.
No one made small talk with the band, as they grimly trooped up onto the stage and begin to sling open cases and horseblankets and flasks of their own. Cool silver flasks, those, with an owl-eyed goddess on them spreading herself wide open for fabulous creatures to emerge from... This was starting to get seriously unreal.
There was power, here, power fiery of eye and breath, that in the moment surpassed Soundgarden, Sinatra, Segovia, or even sweet Sammy D. There would be no sound check. These guys might have given each other a threecount to start, Pete thought. Just like they might have left the place standing...
First instrument to be tuned was what looked like... what sounded like... yes it was... an honest-to Cuchulain stand-up harp, looked like it was done after the style of the eighteenth centurey. The Irish Eighteenth centurey. A carved figurehead of rowan trees stood out from it, a different goddess, a Bridget-goddess with a high, upthrust bosom and a proud, haughty face.
The accordian player was a little guy with pale skin and tipped ears and a huge mustache as black as his hair , wonderfully spindly hands that danced like surgeon's instruments, too fast to catch...
"...travelers," Shandeed was saying. Pete goggled at her, waiting for her to pick up the train of thought and continue, as the band began warming up.
She seemed tired, handling her liquor well but not up for much more wake-time of any kind. Fighting sleep. After a moment, she remembered what she was going to say, and reached for another smoke.
"Yeah. Everyone just kind of leaves them alone. They eat and drink for free. And they always end on the same song. Not in English."
It took a while for Pete to form the thought. "Gaelic?"
She immediately made a face. "Nah. My old Granther speaks that, and it's not the same. Too many different ups and downs. It puts me in mind of a tragedy, for some reason. The song sounds very sad..."
"NOW THE MAN THAT FIGHTS FOR HONOR, NONE CAN BLAME HIM
MAY LUCK ATTEND WHEREVER HE MAY ROAM..."
Then the ragtag-and-bobtail knot of hoboes, Gypsies, drunks and drug takers and perverts unnerved that had stormed in from the cold like som kind of posse comitatus tied into an uptempo version of "The Homestead Strike Song" that had every miner in the place bellowing along out of tune and swinging their pint glasses everywhere.
"AND NO SON OF HIS SHALL EVER LIVE TO SHAME HIM,
WHILST LIBERTY... AND HONOURRRRR... RRRRULE OUR... HOOOOME..."
Everything began to blur into a timeless white haze. Pete couldn't tell when the song changed, or changed again, or after that, or that... Roaring like an ocean, the nearly-chinless singer wrapped his hands and teeth around all the words...
"I'm a decent boy just landed from the town of Ballyfad,
I want a situation, yes, and I want it very bad..."
After a while, Pete was so drunk on the music, as were all the regulars, that he couldn't tell the fog outside from the smoke within, the swirling blue light of the moon above from the baby-spotlight below.
"I've seen employment advertised, ' 'Tis just the thing,' says I,
But the dirty spalpeen ended with..."
They had the room. In that weird moon-pool light, the whole bar sang along...
"NO IRISH NEED APPLY!!!"
And then the part happened that he couldn't understand.
Everyone was shouting so loud they couldn't even hear themselves, let alone the band. The moonlight streamed in every window, and the candles bounced on the tables and the liquor sloshed everywhere and they were ALL STILL SINGING ALONG, until--
Until.
Until the song changed, and the bottom dropped from beneath Pete's sneakers. Though a few of the old men in their cups were a little weepy around the gills, he was the only one on his feet, roaring through fierce tears like blood from the eyesockets of Blind Homer.
Petros Anestis Tsarouhas, Pete to his friends, could never have spelled, or transliterated, the words to the bloody old mythic lay his grandfather used to sing him at bed-time. How some old witch like Circe was shown up by a troop of wandering musicians, who she then condemned with her last breath to wander the earth forever more, and neaver find a home for their heads.
He could have sung the song backward, though it was in koine Greek. No one spoke that any more. It wasn't even his Grandpa Andreas' tonge. It was the tongue of those bards on the march, who could never rest until the end of the world...
"We keep it to ourselves," his grandpa told him, when he interviewed him for some five-hundred level writing course or other, "stories like that. Everyone on Earth has raided our tombs, including us. We have to hold on to something. Even a lullaby."
When they heard Pete bellowing along, all of the band hissed simultaneously. Strings broke in the air, and their odd flat countenances glared cloaks and daggers through the smoke, eyes burning in the gloom and mouths gaping wide with horrid warnings as they looked up, and pointed at him, one by one, and...
After a horrible, discordant note on the PA there weren't even any instruments there on the stage anymore. Just disassembled dust, settling back into shape around nothing at all.
Then Billy Frick tapped Pete on the shoulder. Fourteen other regulars walled him in.
By that point, Shandeen was weeping in the bathroom. Pat held the shotgun on him. Frick grabbed him by the waistband of his Levis and proceeded to open the front door with his head, ramming him collar-first as the crowd all roared,
"OUT!!! OUT, OUT, OUT!!!"
What?
Yes, the recorder in my pocket survived the kicking. I got about three hours of bar babble, low volume... and then two hours of an entire bar, singing along... with no band.
I woke up in a Dumpster five miles out of town, bloody, hung over, parts of me bent back and broken and others needing serious readjustment. They left me my pack and my wallet.
Back at school, where I still haven't left all these years later (just woke up one day and I was getting a paycheck instead of a grade report, ha!) I told the boss I got mugged.
I got off light. I lived. You're the only one who's ever heard that straight through, my friend. Everyone else leaves. I could...
I could sleep. Yeah, I guess I could go home and sleep. Thank you, my friend. Thank you.
What?
No, I told you, I don't want one. I'm still on the wagon.
For Howard Waldrop and Washington Irving,
Maestri.